WHAT TIME DOES THE END OF THE WORLD START?
A sermon preached at St.Luke’s Queen's Park Brighton on 17/11/2019. Text: Luke 21. 5-19
The clocks have gone back, the nights are drawing in, on the sort of miserable damp days we've been having lately it starts getting dark about 3pm and it's almost Advent.
Advent is an awkward little 4 week season when we try to be reflective and penitential while the rest of society starts frenzied preparations for the secular celebration of Christmas, this year distracted by the sales pitches of politicians on the election trail.
Our Sunday readings start talking about the "last things", the end of the world, the second coming and judgment day.
Some Christians, with the mentality of trainspotters ticking off the numbers of engines they've seen, set to work on magical computations of when the end will come. Whatever their predictions, their calculations are hopelessly flawed and they are always wrong.
But, taking a less mathematical approach, it is true that we do in fact live in a state and prolonged period of suspense between the beginning of the end, which is how the evangelists saw the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in AD70, and the "end of the end", whenever and whatever that may be.
And there are times during this period when we might reasonably fear that annihilation could be just around the corner.
Right now, I would go so far as to say that, so long as we have Trump in the White House, we face not only the danger of nuclear annihilation as a result of his erratic behaviour and hair-trigger temper buts also the destruction of the planet by irreparable damage to the climate.
As the editor of the Church Times observed last week, Trump has deliberately filed the official papers to pull America out of the Paris Agreement on climate change on the first day he could legally do so - three years to the day since President Obama signed to bind the US for a minimum of three years to the landmark Paris deal. Trump would rather appease the powerful oil industry lobby than do his bit to prevent a worldwide climate catastrophe in our lifetime or certainly in that of our children.
Is this the sort of thing Jesus meant by the "end of the end"? I don't know but, if so, it will certainly pre-empt any Second Coming on earth. We would be left simply to wonder what will happen in the afterlife.
Jesus warns that, while nation rises against nation, during great earthquakes, famines and plagues (all of which disasters we can already attest to), Christians still alive will be persecuted for their faith.
To that I can also attest. I have seen an Iranian strip off and show me his back with the scars from lashes inflicted as a punishment for being caught with a bible in his luggage at Teheran airport. And we all know what happens to Christians today in many other countries at the hands of fanatical Islamist terrorists.
Not that anything like that has ever happened to me, or, I hope and assume, to anybody here. The most we have to put up with is a bit of ridicule and sarcasm.
So what do we do in these pre-end times? What should the attitude of a simple, orthodox, card-carrying Christian like you or me be?
NOT an unhealthy obsession with guessing precisely when or how Armageddon might happen but rather a humble and sobering reflection on the decisive judgment before God which we will face sooner or later.
I mean a personal, private and searching judgment for each human being as an individual.
And when we think about this, what should we then do?
Take Our Lord’s advice to remain always on the alert. Be ready on a moment’s notice to give a good account of ourselves whenever we may be called upon to do so.
And the only way we'll be able to do that is if we have simply tried our honest best day in day out (whether we always succeeded on not) to do the right thing.
Isaiah says somewhere: Why Lord do you leave us to stray from your ways and to harden our hearts against fearing you?
I suppose the correct theological answer to that question would be something to do with free will and original sin but the question is a more poignant one on the emotional level and it echoes all around us.
The contempt or indifference of so many towards our religion is plainly born of a hardening of the heart against respect for God.
But don’t let’s get on our high horse. This sad condition can just as easily affect those who count themselves as Christians.
Bitter experience teaches us that, if you neglect God in your daily behaviour, if you are careless or lazy in the discipline of prayer, then you can usually expect (unless He has some particularly urgent business with you) to feel God’s absence.
It will seem as if He has gone away, hurt and disappointed at your rejection but never giving up hope that you may come back to Him.
That lesson, that basic law of religious nature, is stamped all over the pages of the Old Testament in the drama of God’s frustrated love affair with the ancient Israelites.
And it is a timeless lesson which applies to the spiritual health of any church community.
Day by day, little by little, we must try to keep God at the centre of our lives, to stay awake and alert as our Lord advises, so that our hearts do not become hardened through boredom, distraction or wickedness from fearing the Lord, so that we will be able to give a good account of ourselves at the last judgment.
And the wonderful and mysterious thing is that, just as God may well seem very distant and irrelevant as a result of our hardening our hearts and turning our backs on Him, equally He is likely to respond with love and delight (like the father of the prodigal son) if we repent and ask if, after doing our own thing for a while, we might be allowed once more to put our hand in His and walk with Him.
So be in the habit of praying but it is also to be in the habit of giving thanks. Never forget the thanks part.
However wrong my life goes, whatever ghastly things happen to me, no matter how much of a mess I make, I always have at least three things to be thankful for:
· the gift of life in the first place, however long or short it is
· the knowledge that God loves me, come what may, however soon the world ends, just as I am,
· and the opportunity to make His day (and mine) by loving Him in return.